A “Black Day” For Walmart – Website Glitches Causes Havoc And Major Losses

By Boaz Berkowitz

Date:
Wednesday, November 6, 2013 3:28 PM EST

Being well connected with the deal hunter community, I was quickly tipped off about something unusual happening earlier today. I started rapidly getting “deal alerts.” They were popping up one after another in quick succession, but all for the same store – Walmart.com. That isn’t so unusual in and of itself, being that retailers sometimes have major, store-wide sales. But these alerts featured suspiciously low prices, prices so low as to be laughable. Treadmills, electronics, computers, toys, you name it, were being sold for as much as 90% off retail. Even Black Friday doesn’t get that good. Clearly something was wrong over at Walmart.

True, I’m trying to run a company, but this smelled like a good story. I went to check out some of these unbelievable deals but it was as if I was playing a cat and mouse game with Walmart. A user would post a great find, but as soon as I would click on the link, the item page would be taken down. This happened over and over again, though in my defense, I was trying to do this on my smartphone with a spotty connection. Even so, time and time again, I read of others having great success, such as

Purchasing dozens of new hit video games like Battlefield 4, Grand Theft Auto 5, Pokemon and others which normally go for around $60 each, for $18.

Giant, high end big screen TVs normally thousands of dollars for only a few hundred:

A $200 Lego set for $10.99

A fully loaded, Acer computer system, which normally sells for close to $1000, for only $151

And the list goes on and on. It was entertaining seeing all the people brag about their conquests. Those with the most success selected in-store pickup. But many orders selected for shipping slipped through as well. Such as this order for a motherboard and solid state drive which sold for $20 each instead of their usual $260 and $200 respectively.

While I generally support honoring price mistakes, I believe it was harder for Walmart to do so in this situation. Airlines with available seats often end up selling them at a fraction of the cost anyway. That's because the plane flies whether it has empty
seats or not. There's a negligble increase in cost/each additioanl passenger. So as long as that extra passenger is paying something, the airline still makes money. In Walmart's case, items were sold far below cost. Walmart took a huge hit.

I've read that stores like Walmart can make as much as 80% of their year long revenues during the holiday season. Can Walmart really recover from such a debacle? Seems to me that they lost millions before the holiday season even managed to kick off. I
see now all these items are sold out both in store and online so they can't even sell more if they wanted to.

Boaz is the founder and CEO of TalkMarkets. Boaz started his career as a manager at Bloomberg’s corporate headquarters in Manhattan. He was then lured into the .com world where he launched two e-commerce websites for a successful electronics retailer and headed its online operations for ...
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Boaz is the founder and CEO of TalkMarkets. Boaz started his career as a manager at Bloomberg’s corporate headquarters in Manhattan. He was then lured into the .com world where he launched two e-commerce websites for a successful electronics retailer and headed its online operations for nearly six years. Boaz then traveled overseas where he served as Seeking Alpha’s Director of Contributor Relations. After returning to the US, Boaz became the Chief Strategy Officer for GLX, a global online investment community which connects investors directly with other investors and the companies they invest in.

At Seeking Alpha he oversaw its relationship with numerous strategic partners and the company’s thousands of authors - nearly tripling the number of contributors. In less than two years, he implemented dozens of new initiatives increasing the overall satisfaction rate of authors from 23% to 97%, He was also instrumental in securing an additional $7 million in Seeking Alpha’s latest round of funding.

Boaz is involved with several charitable and community organizations and sits on the Board of Directors for Binghamton University's Hillel. He has also served as an auxiliary police officer for the NYPD at Manhattan's 24th precinct.

Boaz holds both a BS and BA from New York's Binghamton University and MBA degrees from both Tel Aviv University's Recanati School of Business and Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Business.